How to Break the Political Fever

By Garrison Keillor

Politics doesn't come naturally to me. I don't have the old savoir faire. I have a chilly demeanor and a long, sad face that comes from growing up among good people who told me I was going straight to hell. I'm not a salesman cheerful certainty makes me uneasy. Nonetheless, last winter, moved by a sense that the beloved country is in peril, I put aside other projects, wrote a political book, knocked on doors and handed out literature (now I know how Jehovah's Witnesses feel), donated a bucket of money and stood up and made stump speeches about the disastrous regime in power, its moral bankruptcy and arrogance. Now, on election eve, I face up to the fact that one man will lose and limp away to join the ranks of noble losers (Eugene V. Debs, Barry Goldwater, George McGovern) while the other one grins and waves and elementary schools are named after him. So what happens next? The winners smirk and gloat, of course, but what do the losers do?

1) Join the winning party

2) Curse the darkness

3) Move to Vancouver

4) Take up the sins of the flesh, all of them, not leaving out a single one

5) Brood, connive, conspire

A year of passion has come to a boil. Every morning my emailbox is full of forwarded political diatribes and manifestos. I order a sign, 4 ft. by 6 ft.--I am actually going to stand by the side of the road and hold it, that's how nuts I am. I take my face to a suburb where Democrats are a sort of alien life-form, and I stand on a bench on a deck in the dark and talk to 80 people shivering in the cold like boat refugees, and I excoriate and extol and exhort in uplifting cadences about this evil war, the miserable economy that is bringing back the 60-hr. workweek and the folks who don't mind this war so long as their kids don't have to fight it. Afterward we hobnob in the kitchen and enjoy a little solidarity around coffee and fudge bars, but as I drive home, the car wants to head west out across the prairie, toward the wilderness, away from newspapers and TV and politics, to a cabin, a lake, a boat, a bed, a fire, a book, where I could get this noise out of my head. There are little towns out there where a person could walk around and get leaf smoke up the nostrils and that could pretty well clear the head.

Some in my family are exchanging fiery e-mails, with hard, jagged sentences IN ALL-CAPITAL LETTERS SO THE POINT IS NOT MISSED, and Scripture is quoted and also Mark Twain, the elitist liberal baby killers vs. the Brownshirt storm troopers NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE and what will come of all this on Nov. 3? Some will pick up the morning paper and save it for a souvenir, and the others will wrap up the garbage in it.

What will reconcile us is what has always restored our sanity, and that is the plain pleasures of the physical world, our common love of coffee, the world of apples, the movements of birds, the lives of dogs, the touch of skin. Music. Dancing to music. Shooting baskets. Shooting conservatively, scoring liberally. Lacing up our skates, gliding through the dusk. Having worked ourselves into a fever over the future of Western civilization, we will now begin enjoying our oatmeal again, with raisins, chopped apricots and honey from bees that grazed in meadows of clover. The beauty of engagement is disengagement. You simply put on your jacket and walk out the door and find good health. There is no fever that a 10-mile hike can't cure.

Twenty years ago, I gave up TV, and now I am going to take a sabbatical from the news and live in the immediate world. The neighbors are expecting a baby girl. My daughter is taking up the cello. My mother is game for more Scrabble. There is wood to be cut in the family woodlot. I've been a prisoner of the New York Times and have read enough for a while and want to get loose. Next week I'm out of here. And maybe the President is too. Crawford, Texas, is a fine place. A man could never weary of the wonders to be found there.